What is even going on, when "liberal columnist" Maureen Dowd writes a column about how Obama should govern the country the way Sarah Palin promotes books, and token conservative Ross "still at least definitely not Bill Kristol" Douthat patiently explains that Huckabee and Palin are both ridiculous jokes.

Well, what is going on is that Ross "cares" about the "credibility" of the Republican party, and also he knows, as a grown man who reads books and remembers history, that these clowns will not be president of anything, ever.

Whereas Maureen is, as always, internalizing and repeating the dumbest talking points of the Cheney wing of the Republican party (a world where "bowing" is a scandal and "dithering" is a resonant critique) (and also "mom jeans," because, you know, it's not a Maureen Dowd column without a crack about how a Democrat is embarrassingly feminine). Obviously Obama should just act more like a petulant, polarizing moron, screeching for attention and repeatedly castigating the various people who have wronged him, because that would definitely take care of this Afghanistan mess.

Here are the sort of people he could then welcome into his governing coalition, once he "goes rogue."

1. Andrea Peyser confronts the mom of a 16 year-old shooting suspect about why she is such a bad mom that her kid would shoot somebody. Answer: Because she is selfish and she lets her son hang out with his relatives thugs. Black people! Why can't they raise kids the right way? "There do exist real fathers. Take Federico Grullon. He won't allow his three kids to leave the house."
Black kids should be shackled at all times.

2. Did you know there is a soup kitchen now for orothodox Jews? And other Jews are facing foreclosure? But Jews are the ones with all the money!

So — shhh! — The United Jewish Appeal has started Connect to Care, which already has given more than 8,000 needy Jews financial services, job help and mental-health counseling to get through unfamiliar territory.
Just don't expect anyone to admit it.

3. "If Johnny Depp is the Sexiest Man Alive, I'm swearing off men." That one wasn't totally unexpected.

Andrea today issues her sentencing recommendations in the case of liberal lawyer Lynne Stewart: Let the fat bitch rot. That is an accurate summary!

Let her rot.

Charismatic terror monger Lynne Stewart is no beauty. But she is a great actress.

The lady ex-lawyer who loves terrorists too much lumbered into the Manhattan federal courtroom in 2006, all 200-plus pounds of fire-breathing radical.

What a terrible, fat lady. She should have gotten more time, just to do those prison workouts! Eh?

Her lawyers said — are you ready? — Stewart was too fat for the lockup.

Lawyer Elizabeth Fink said her obese client's breast cancer was sure to return in a place where women are denied the dignity of wearing bras.

"If you send her to prison, she is going to die," Fink intoned.

We should be so lucky.

You can write to Andrea at andrea.peyser@nypost.com.

I was beginning to panic. I pored over the book to see if there was anything that I shared in common with this apotheosis of traditional American values.

We both had what Palin calls "a love of the written word" and we both won Veterans of Foreign Wars writing contests as children.

We both read "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" and "Animal Farm."

We both came from families that loved Ronald Reagan, drove Ramblers and watched "The Lawrence Welk Show" and "The Wonderful World of Disney" on Sunday nights.

Palin's father offered to let her hold some moose eyes. My dad came from Ireland, where they ate sheep eyes soup.

Sarah and I both banged on the upright piano in the living room and twirled around to "The Sound of Music."

We both grew up loving Hershey's bars and bacon and steak. As Sarah explains her carnivore philosophy: "I always remind people from outside our state that there's plenty of room for all Alaska's animals - right next to the mashed potatoes."

She hunted moose, and I hunted for Bullwinkle on TV.

We both belonged to the scouts, were baby sitters and kept diaries. (Of course, I was writing about making Jiffy Pop, and she, stacking firewood.)

We both now have stressful lives where we sometimes, as she puts it, want "a wife" to organize things. And we both went through an Ann Taylor period before discovering Dolce & Gabbana at consignment shops.

And both of them are propped up and supported by powerful, supposedly smart people for no other reason than that they both annoy liberals.

Noonan thinks it is good that Obama is thinking! Noonan thinks it is bad that Obama is not asking the people who've been wrong about everything for years what they would do.

The president is not, apparently, holding serious discussions with the most informed and concerned Republicans from Capitol Hill and what used to be called the foreign-policy establishment, and this, if true, is bad.

Hah. Ha ha ha. The "foreign-policy establishment" is just made up of the hawkiest hawks in the world. The Republicans from Capitol Hill want us to nuke Iran and France.

The cliché that politics stops at the water's edge is a fiction worth preserving. It's a story that ought to be true and sometimes is true. There seems to be something in this president that resists really including the opposition.

His Army Secretary is a Republican! His Afghanistan commander was appointed a director of the Joint Staff by President Bush! The rest of the opposition is not serious. At all! The deny Obama's legitimacy, they seek only to destroy him, they are not interested in being "included" because they plan to campaign against whatever decision he makes, Peggy. (Unless the plan is endless war forever with everyone. They like that one.)

But! The important bit is that once JFK gave a good speech about the Cuban Missile Crisis—while his administration was in the midst of having no fucking clue what to do about it—and Obama should consider doing the same thing. But his speech should not be too good, because Americans are worried about the deficit.

Also Peggy used to like the TV show Dragnet, which was about a police officer who told ladies to man up and stop crying, and also he arrested hippies. That is what Obama should do, to show he is serious. The end.

Bartiromo wrote a Q&A column called FaceTime, which consisted of her asking questions of some business guy each week. She's not a bulldog questioner, but she's not incompetent either. Her strongest point was access: Hank Greenberg, Tim Geithner, and Jeffrey Katzenberg have all sat for her in the past month.

Her downsides: She's perceived as friendly to CEOs, which is part of the reason she gets that access. And whatever they pay her for that column is certainly inflated by her own celebrity, which is hard to justify when Bloomberg's getting ready to lay off a bunch of BW staffers. They'll be able to get good access with a much cheaper columnist, anyhow; who else will CEOs rattle off talking points to, bloggers? LOL!

Don't feel bad, Maria. Gurl U no Wall St luvs U no matta wut. Gurl let Jamie Dimon buy U a drank.

Andrea Peyser scoffs at ESPN's Steve Phillips claiming a sex addiction just because he sexed up his young assistant. Andrea Peyser thinks sex addict treatment "Sounds like a great way to meet horny chicks." And how!

Addictions are routinely compared to deadly diseases, such as cancer, by people who'd rather drink than put down the glass, the crack pipe, or — hopefully — the condom. This is an outrage that sickens those who are truly diseased.

In the rest of her column she advises Jennifer Anniston, "Next time, try showering with a friend."; she calls the Yankess "oversexed"; she jealously mocks Maureen Dowd for wanting to bone the president; and she curses New Yorkers for being so fat, and unsexy.

There is no shame in seeking help, Andrea.

The last time early-1960s advertising executive and New York Times op-ed columnist Maureen Dowd was so obviously baffled by a slight subversion of gender norms, noted masculine asshole Tom DeLay was gyrating in a feminine manner on the television.

This time, it's Barry Obama, the elegant and lady-like Democrat, who is, according to recent reports, excluding ladies from his inner circle, because they do not like to golf or talk about the football or play the basketball.

In her column on this important matter, Dowd simply ignores her own lengthy history of interpreting Obama according to her rigid "Democrats are fags and Republicans are real men" worldview. Instead, he is like presidents of old, who crack "racy" jokes with male aides. She quotes "a girlfriend" (Alessandra?) who wishes the uppity ladies would just let the president be a man with men in peace.

You would think someone who repeatedly called Obama "oBambi," and also butterfly, in columns dedicated to the argument that Hillary Clinton was the real man in the party, even if she pretended to have a vagina and ladylike tendencies (like those tears), would write a column expressing some sort of mild surprise that Obama is perhaps more traditionally masculine than she thought.

You would think she would remember the fact that last year she wrote that Obama is "the more emotionally delicate candidate, and the one who has the more feminine consensus management style." And then, perhaps, she might revisit those words, and say "huh, perhaps I was wrong, perhaps Obama is not a girly man."

Instead, she (this is once again nothing unusual for Maureen) talks about how it is those cruel Republicans who wish to paint every male Democrat as a "Mom-jeans-wearing girly-boy." It's a good thing no supposedly liberal columnists for supposedly liberal newspapers play along with that creaky old act!

And then she throws in a "Rahm Emanuel is a fag" laugh line for the hell of it.

Obama likes to play sports, watch sports and talk sports. (Even his favorite TV shows, "Mad Men" and "Entourage," are set in male-dominated worlds.) So the Obama aides who can do that, like Robert Gibbs, have a deeper personal connection with the president than someone like Rahm Emanuel, the former ballet dancer who prefers yoga to golf.

Yes, Maureen, we know that it is funny that a man would do yoga (is that funny, actually? is it 30 years ago?), but the problem with that little joke is that Rahm is part of the circle of men that Obama is reportedly more at ease with. The original stupid story was not "Obama excludes women and girly Rahm Emanuel from his inner circle."

On Monday, Lucinda's advice column featured a letter from a girl who said that someone slipped her a roofie at a club; she had to be taken to the hospital, and when she called two of her friends in the middle of the night to "beg them to join me while I was recovering," they didn't want to come until the morning. And she was upset about that. And Lucinda was like, well, who the fuck wants to go drive to the hospital at 4 a.m. for something that is not a life-threatening incident and, indeed, may have sounded at the time like something that was your own doing, crazy girl? Your family or your boyfriend would be obligated to come, but your friends probably thought you were just way drunk or took too many drugs or whatever and they were pissed at you a little bit. So, don't sweat it too much. Chalk it up to miscommunication.

Which was our reaction too, exactly! Tough to judge the friends in this case without knowing what the drugged friend was actually doing and saying at the time. (Although we are neither women, nor the type of person who has "friends"). But the internet commenters were basically like: Lucinda, you are a horrible person, I have gotten up in the middle of the night 43 times to visit my roofied friends, plus this girl was probably sexually assaulted, did you even think of that, you awful, awful internet advice columnist? And Lucinda replied no, she didn't really think of that, since there's nothing in the letter about it, but really, come on, people. It's not that big a deal. But there's that "Remove Lucinda Rosenfeld" petition, still there, on the internet!

Shit. You internet commenters are putting all this effort into firing an online advice columnist who's not Cary Tennis? You people need help.

Under editor Fred Hiatt, the Post op-ed page has gone completely off the rails. They picked up Bill Kristol after the Times dumped him for being not just wrong but boring and lazy. They openly allow George Will to lie, to straight-up lie, without fact-checking or corrections, because we all know reality is open to different "interpretations" and if a prominent columnist writes something patently untrue the best response is to then publish a "true" column by someone else as a counterpoint, because that doesn't just represent everything misleading and terrible about the moden political press. They still publish Richard Cohen. The regular columnists are, for the most part, interchangeable ancient "moderate" liberals who haven't written or thought anything vaguely interesting since 1974. Anne Applebaum was allowed to publish a blog post in support of Roman Polanski without disclosing that her husband is Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski, who opposes extradition. Richard Cohen, again.

And on October 10, the Post published an insane editorial on how the Nobel Prize should've been awarded to a murdered Iranian protester. This suggests that either the entire editorial board doesn't know that Nobel Peace Prizes are never awarded posthumously or they simply don't give a shit. The piece is still not corrected, because presumably any "correction" would have to read "the entire premise of this editorial is bullshit, sorry."

So how do you follow that up? How about by running an op-ed by a law professor and a right-wing think tank goon about how Obama's Nobel Peace Prize was... unconstitutional, maybe? Who knows! Who cares! They acknowledge that two other sitting presidents have received the award, but they do not even do the meaningless-but-intellectually defensible thing of arguing that those awards were also unconstitutional, they just say this time it's different because Obama got it so therefore Congress should forbid him from accepting it, because of the House of Saud.

In conclusion, blogs are killing newspapers by being irresponsible and not caring about "the truth."

It certainly surprised us, that not a single editor told Maureen Dowd to ditch the completely pointless and unfunny parody of the theme song to "Ghostbusters" that opens an otherwise completely harmless and fine column.

"If there's someone weak,
if you've sprung a leak,
if the world looks bleak,
if you hide and seek,
who ya gonna call?
OBAMABUSTERS!"

"If you hide and seek"??? What?

Anyway the rest of the column is about how Dick Cheney and his terrible daughters are all terrible, which you knew. We look forward to next week's column, "Biden He Does As He Pleases," which will explain what to do when you're stuck on the Amtrak between the moon and New York City.

So when you look at the numbers, the heyday of the Soccer Mom is passing. They will continue to exert a measurable influence, but in a world of evolving microtrends, they are on the decline. And on the rise are single, urban workaholics, Internet-junkie empty nesters, and new immigrants taking root.

So, Mark Penn's Trademark Microtrends of The Future:

"Single, urban workaholics"= Alcopops
"Internet-junkie empty nesters"= Masturbating Bears
"New immigrants taking root"= Happenin' Latins

Pay this man one million dollars, at once.
[Pic: Getty]

That is what today's column is about. Maybe? It is a particularly digressive and rambling effort even by Peggy's standards.

It is about "The New Elders," by which she means people who are kind of old, but not yet dead, like Safire and Walter Cronkite are, now. It is the responsibility of The New Elders to be older than young people, who are not yet wise, because they are young.

So the New Elders should try to be responsible, like William Safire was when he repeatedly claimed that Saddam Hussein did 9/11, or like Robert Novak was when he smeared a Chilean diplomat assassinated by Pinochet.

But there is a problem: Peggy Noonan uses math to calculate that there are literally three million crazy people in the United States, and apparently they all listen to Alex Jones.

This is why, I think, so many people-I include, literally, every person I know, from all walks of life, and all ages-are worried that our elected leaders are not safe, that this overheated era will end in some violent act or acts.

Stop reading this and ask whoever's nearby, "Do you find yourself worrying about President Obama's safety?" I do not think you are going to get, "No."

But Peggy, what if you're reading this in the Wall Street Journal opinion section office? Don't you know that OBAMA LOVES DICTATORS?

(Also, like a month ago, it was Barry who was scaring us, according to Peg.)

So you can just read the whole thing here. It is actually a pretty standard conservative fantasy: heroic, tough military men in beautiful, well-pressed uniforms will helpfully right what the stupid American voters made wrong, for the good of the country.

But openly advocating for a coup d'etat is apparently just a bit extreme for Newsmax. Sure, they ran the column initially, but now you can't find it anywhere on their site.

Not that Perry was advocating a coup! He just thinks it is pretty much inevitable and also it would be a wonderful thing.

Will the day come when patriotic general and flag officers sit down with the president, or with those who control him, and work out the national equivalent of a "family intervention," with some form of limited, shared responsibility?

Imagine a bloodless coup to restore and defend the Constitution through an interim administration that would do the serious business of governing and defending the nation. Skilled, military-trained, nation-builders would replace accountability-challenged, radical-left commissars. Having bonded with his twin teleprompters, the president would be detailed for ceremonial speech-making.

Military intervention is what Obama's exponentially accelerating agenda for "fundamental change" toward a Marxist state is inviting upon America. A coup is not an ideal option, but Obama's radical ideal is not acceptable or reversible.

Unthinkable? Then think up an alternative, non-violent solution to the Obama problem. Just don't shrug and say, "We can always worry about that later."

Does that sound like advocacy to you? Of course not. He is just saying it would be patriotic and necessary.

Hey, let's read some passages from a John L. Perry column from 2004, for fun!

Think, also, what license the dyslexic rent-a-crowd poster-scribblers will have with Barack Obama's moniker. Seemingly endless permutations off the letters spelling Obama are good for many a quality-time family-values game of "Anagrams."

Top of the Charts

Already you can hear rappers ranting out best-seller CDs without once repeating themselves:

"Obama, Boama, Amabo, Maboa.

"Oamba, Bamoa, Abamo, Maoba.

"Oabam, Baoma, Amoba, Moaba.

"Obaam, Bamao, Aobma, Mboaa.

"Obmaa, Bomaa, Aobam, Maaob."

Captures the very heart and soul of America, doesn't it?.

Everybody Sing Now

"We're Barack Obama bound!

"There'll be no heebie-jeebies hanging 'round.

"All aboard Barack's Express!"

This man is a national treasure.

(In other news: genuine national treasure Gore Vidal once again predicted, as he's been predicting for 20 years, that the US is headed toward military dictatorship.)

His nickname was literally "The Hammer." He was a thuggish, corrupt former exterminator who ran the House of Representatives like it was an organized crime family.. He loved wars and tax cutting and gerrymandering and fucking over opponents. He is Maureen Dowd's dream man.

But there he is prancing like a pretty pony on television's Dancing With the Stars!

The Hammer, who in rehearsal admitted to feeling like "a complete goose" - and not simply because he had his golf shirt tucked into his sweat pants - is clinging to his Texas machismo even as he follows Cheryl's instruction to find his "feminine side."

"I'm being more feminine and a little prissy," he said, using a word that smacks of über-alpha "I am not gay even though I have on heels and sparkles and want a disco-ball trophy" overcompensation.

Look how torn she is! His sad protestations in defense of his threatened masculinity must be mocked, but we must admire his use of the "uber-alpha" word "prissy," which is the sort of word someone like Maureen Dowd might use to describe someone like John Edwards.

Well, let's just make fun of his stupid girly clothes one more time (also he winked at a gay!) and then finish up with some meaningless "wacky op-ed about an unexpected situation" boilerplate.

Once the Hammer tried to outfox Democrats. Now he's trying to outfox-trot Donny Osmond. Once he whipped Republicans relentlessly to keep their votes in line. Now he says he and his daughter have "a strategy to whip the vote" on "Dancing."

Once the Hammer accepted a million dollars from Russian oil executives in exchange for a vote. Now he accepts compliments from an effeminate British judge in exchange for many votes. Once he blamed the Columbine massacre on the teaching of evolution. Now he blames his poor dancing ability on the fact that he hurt his foot. Once he violated Texas law by funneling corporate money to state legislative races via the RNC. Now he is a sad old man on TV instead of in jail forever.

Maureen Dowd finished this column after furiously voting for DeLay literally thousands of times.

Recap: We got a leaked internal email in which a Burson-Marsteller executive mused over how to use Mark Penn's newspaper column as a tool for attracting clients from the industry he had just written about. Which is totally unethical! But the WSJ decided to keep Penn as a columnist after a mealy-mouthed explanation, because they are pathetic, just like Penn himself. Now, at long last, Mark has cast more intellectual Micro-Pearls before swine (people like you).

Did you know that people have cell phones now and not home phones? Mark Penn calls that a million-dollar motherfuckin' Microtrend, kids. You know who is bucking said trend? Burson-Marsteller CEO Mark Penn.

But the flip side of phoneless homes is a more transparent, always-on lifestyle represented by the rise of cellphones. Landline or no, I'll stay connected to my daughter. But she can always phone home — we're resisting becoming a phoneless home, at least for now, if only so she won't miss the reassurance of place, as I do.

Burson client Sony Ericsson heartily applauds this growing Microtrend and all its various manifestations! The FreeMove Mobile Alliance (a Burson client!) salutes it as well! This is a great excuse to call all the telecom companies—we can send a note from MJP saying he wants a meeting, to discuss Mictrotends, and the ways in which they touch one's heart! And family! And daughters!

Is Burson-Marsteller capable of being embarrassed by anything? Not sure, but we'll find out.
[Pic: Getty]

No, seriously, he is outright saying that the autocratic one-party Chinese government is superior to our own. There is no equivocation in this line:

There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today.

And why are things better in China? Because the current "reasonably enlightened group of people" in charge of China, at the moment, can just impose "politically difficult but critically important policies" like raising gas prices to encourage clean power investment and so on.

So, yes, the party may be increasingly corrupt and full of the Princeling children of former Communist party officials, the party may stoke violence against ethnic minorities, it may censor the media and lock up journalists and cheerfully ignore human rights, but at least they can get cap-and-trade passed.

The rest of his column is about how the GOP is ideologically bankrupt, obstructionist, out of ideas, and actively damaging the nation, but prefacing that obvious point with one-party rule envy is a little bizarre. Friedman, you'd be the first against the wall in the Cultural Revolution!

"My babies don't walk-they take a limo. Juicy's legs are two inches long! This is not a marathon runner. I have more hair under my arms than Juicy has on her whole body."

Relaxing at home, Cindy's wearing a black T-shirt with heart-shaped photos of the pooches on the breast. "My breeder makes them every Christmas or New Year's, or the day the incinerator got stuffed up-whatever day there is to celebrate," she says. "I have hundreds of them."

The fact that Cindy can reveal these psychotic tendencies for years on end and not be involuntarily committed just goes to show how great New York really is.
[Pic: Getty]

Scumbag spotted!

Mark Penn's latest (old, and none too insightful) 'Microtrend' column is about "glamping"—glamorous camping. It ran last weekend. By Monday, according to an internal email obtained by Gawker, Burson was already trying to recruit companies from the industry featured in the column as clients. Burson Executive Vice President (and former Bill Clinton speechwriter) Josh Gottheimer urged Burson's senior staff—including Founding Chairman Harold Burson, US President & CEO Patrick Ford, and others, to use Penn's column as a tool to approach clients in the camping industry about business. Not only that—he recommends that Mark Penn "send a note" to the CEO of these potential clients requesting a meeting.

You may recall that Mark Penn was canned as Hillary Clinton's campaign strategist after it emerged that his firm was trying to get a contract to do PR work for the nation of Colombia—work that went against Clinton's own political position (a story that the WSJ broke). We pointed out at the time that it was idiotic to expect a full-time PR exec to be anything but a PR exec—Penn's job is to bring in business to Burson (one of America's biggest, and shadiest PR firms), and anyone expecting Burson to pass up business opportunities because they somehow clash with Mark Penn's various other hobbies will be sorely disappointed.

Moonlighting from his PR career has already screwed a politician. Now he's screwing a newspaper the same way. Here we have a Wall Street Journal columnist whose firm is taking his newspaper columns fresh off the press and running to any company connected to the column's subject of the week, trying to get them to sign up with said firm—led by the columnist himself!—for PR work. At best, Penn has a conflict of interest here that can only be resolved by resigning one job or the other. The least generous interpretation would be that Burson-Marsteller is purposefully using the editorial space of the Wall Street Journal as a business recruitment tool—fooling one of the nation's most prestigious papers into giving it ad space it can use to promote its own clients, for free.

Either way, whatever sort of credibility Penn had as an expert who spots trends based on data rather than on his own firm's business considerations is clearly shot. WSJ parent company Dow Jones' own Code of Conduct states that "The Company will suffer, for example, if our customers cannot assume" these principles are followed:

• Our analyses represent our best independent judgments rather than our preferences, or those of our sources, advertisers or information providers;
• Our opinions represent only our own editorial philosophies; or
• There are no hidden agendas in any of our journalistic undertakings.

We're contacting the WSJ and Burson-Marsteller and we'll bring you their responses when we get them. In the meantime: Don't go trusting any Microtrends. Unless you're Mark Penn's client.

Update: The WSJ referred us to Alan Murray, Deputy Managing Editor of The Wall Street Journal and Executive Editor for the Journal Online. He tells us he is "Looking into it. We have a clear conflict of interest agreement with Mr. Penn and all our outside columnists."
[Pic: Getty]